antdude writes: "This seven/7 pages OCModShop article look into the past and the current Windows versions — "Today Microsoft launched its latest version of its iconic Operating System (OS): Windows 8. There have been many version of Windows over the years, and one can't help but wonder what justifies this version number. Microsoft and other technology companies have over-written and re-named their product history before, so we take a good hard look at all the previous operating systems to see if the numbers add up.

Microsoft Windows started as version 1.0 as an add-on to its disk operating system (DOS). The product was a simple graphical user interface (GUI) program that was little more than a visual file manager. Windows 2.0 was released to take advantage of the features offered by Intel’s 286 processor. Windows 3 is the version that really started Microsoft on its current path of success.

All of these versions numbers are very logical and can be easily counted. Where things start to get a little ambiguous is when Windows NT is thrown into the mix..."

We're talking about the apparent need of every web service out there to add intermediate steps to sample what we click on before they send us on to our real destination. This has been going on for a long time and is slowly starting to build into something of a redirect hell on the Web.